


All This And Heaven Too

by TheAddict4Dramatics



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic Fluff, Exposition, F/M, Fluff and Angst, I Don't Even Know, Literally all exposition, No Dialogue, The X-Files without The X-Files, Who Knows What This Is?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 20:34:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20442119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAddict4Dramatics/pseuds/TheAddict4Dramatics
Summary: She refuses to let him call her Dana on principle as he refuses to let her call him Fox. They are Scully and Mulder to each other, no Agent, no Doctor, just Scully and Mulder and it’s ridiculous because it’s the very opposite of intimate to call someone by their last name but it feels anything but. It’s not her husband’s name though, that much he knows and he has no idea why it makes him so happy that she didn’t take her husband’s name. It doesn’t make her any less married only somehow to him it does.The X-Files without any x-files. AU where Mulder is still in the VCU and Scully is a FBI pathologist. Honestly no idea what this is, it's just under 4000 words of exposition that just sort out all came out in a giant fic burp.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing belongs to me except the mistakes as this is un-beta'd.
> 
> Title from Florence and the Machine song.

The first time he meets her he feels the connection instantly. It’s like something straight off of the pages of a cliché romance novel, the magnetic pull to a complete stranger, the feeling that nothing will ever quite be the same again. _Agent Scully_, that’s her name – Dana Scully and she looks so very young but she’s oh so feisty and fierce. Beautiful too.

He notices the wedding band on her finger at once and is immediately disappointed. But she never mentions her husband and he never asks; he doesn’t want to know about the man that she goes home to every night. He’s only just met her and already he wishes it were him. He’s got it bad. Mulder is married himself, has been for almost four years but the marriage is falling apart. Rationally he knows that this is part of it, he’s unhappy at home, he is longing for something different and she is the different that is right in front of him. He has a degree in psychology and over thirty years’ experience of his own fucked up psyche, he knows what’s going on but he can’t help feeling drawn to her any way. There is something in the cool, calm, rational science that she brings to his investigation that fascinates him. Perhaps this is why he tells her about his sister on the first case they work together, late one evening in her office next to the morgue. She sits and listens carefully without interrupting but she doesn’t look at him with the pity he has come to expect when revealing his tragic, little past. He’s eternally grateful for it. 

After that case he finds himself requesting her specifically for all of his cases, claiming she has some false expertise or experience with everything he encounters. If she notices that the fact she always ends up working his cases is more than a coincidence she doesn’t question it, doesn’t call him out on it. He likes to think that perhaps she enjoys working with him as much as he does her. Perhaps she lives for their cute, banter-filled exchanges and full blown clashes of opinions just as he does. Perhaps she lies awake at night longing for him too. 

Diana leaves him six months after he first meets Scully. She refuses to let him call her Dana on principle as he refuses to let her call him Fox. They are Scully and Mulder to each other, no Agent, no Doctor, just Scully and Mulder and it’s ridiculous because it’s the very opposite of intimate to call someone by their last name but it feels anything but. It’s not her husband’s name though, that much he knows and he has no idea why it makes him so happy that she didn’t take her husband’s name. It doesn’t make her any less married only somehow to him it does. Diana takes a job in Europe without asking his opinion. She doesn’t say it’s the end but they both know it is. When he receives the divorce paperwork in the post four months after she’s gone he is not particularly surprised or saddened by it. The whole course of his marriage has felt inevitable from the beginning and he wonders why he went through with any of it.

Just over a year after he first meets Scully she leaves the bureau on maternity leave. He misses her like a hole right in the centre of his chest. It aches, it oozes and absolutely nothing makes it feel right. It’s crazy really. Positively _spooky_. She’s not his partner, he doesn’t even see her everyday but the bureau doesn’t feel the same without her. He dislikes every pathologist he uses in her absence and he knows it has nothing to do with their medical ability. He misses her ten times more than he has ever missed Diana. He hears through the grapevine that she has had a little girl: Emily. He sends a card and a cute little onesie with an alien on it that he knows Scully will find amusing (they’d had an argument once over the existence of aliens and she’d disagreed with him whole-heartedly and hadn’t be shy to say it. He thinks this is probably the moment he realised that he was in love with her. This smart, sexy, unflappable woman that has come to mean so much to him in such a short time). He sends the items but he doesn’t visit, he doesn’t call. He knows he would not cope very well with the reality of seeing her ‘real’ life laid out before him; her child, her husband, her home. 

When Scully returns to work a few months after the birth he could cry with the relief of it. She’s only in part-time, to fit around childcare but he’ll take it, he’ll take any part of her he can get. She never questions why he didn’t call or visit her in all those months. Perhaps she thinks it is too hard for him to see her normality compared to his broken life: his missing sister and messy divorce and personal crusades that he finds in almost every case. Or perhaps she knows the truth – it’s not her life that he wants, it’s her. Her mother looks after Emily on Tuesday and Friday evenings and these are the precious extra hours that he gets to spend with her. Tuesdays at the gym and Fridays at the shooting range. He doesn’t ask why a pathologist that is rarely out in the field needs to continually work on her shot and she doesn’t ask him why, as a single guy in his thirties, he feels the need to spend every Friday evening with her instead of any potential dates. Daniel, her husband, works both evenings he spends with her and seems to work every other evening too. That’s all she says about him if he ever asks: he’s working, always working. Mulder’s glad. He doesn’t want to know anymore. 

They bond over their losses. Though they never talk about it he is sure it’s what bonds them, one of the things anyway, that they understand each other’s grief in a way not many other people can. Scully has lost her father and sister in the space of eighteen months, his own father goes too around the same time and of course there is the ever present absence of his sister. Melissa, Scully’s sister, is killed in Scully’s home; a burglary gone wrong and after a lengthy investigation Mulder manages to catch the bastard. He gets life without parole. The way Scully looks at him and thanks him after the verdict is something he’ll never forget. He’s glad that he can bring her sister’s killer to justice; somehow it eases the fact he may never be able to do the same with his own sister’s murderer. 


	2. Two

A little over four years after she first breezes into his life Scully gets sick and the bottom of his world falls out. The cancer is rare, advanced, inoperable. She’s going to leave, going to leave everyone sooner rather than later and he cannot cope with it one bit. She has become the only good thing in his life, somehow the only thing that matters, that brings him meaning but he cannot tell her. She has a husband, a soon-to-be widower and a daughter less than three years old that she will be leaving without a mother. She is not his to grieve but _god_ how he grieves for her still, even before she is gone. He visits her in hospital and he knows she sees the toll it is taking on him. All he has done is given her one more thing to worry about leaving behind. He sneaks past the nurses station during the night and sobs into her beside whilst she sleeps. It’s going to be soon, he feels it. He has such little time and he loves her so much. How can the world even think about turning without her in it? And how will he still breathe when she is gone? The weight of it crushes him until he is gasping silently into the skin on the back of her hand. She sleeps through, breathing shallowly until morning. 

When she wakes she is frantic, urgent. She knows better than anyone that time is short. She begs him to help her mother gain custody of Emily. _Not Daniel. She can’t stay with Daniel_. She says it over and over. He doesn’t ask her why but he does not understand. She has never mentioned Daniel being abusive or unfit as a parent. Absent – sure, but a danger to Emily? It doesn’t make sense. Regardless, he promises her he will. It is the only thing he can do for her.

He finds the treatment by chance. An accidental run in with an old friend of his father’s. He doesn’t trust the man and he’s sure that whatever deal he is making will not come for free; he will pay for this somehow in the future but he makes the deal nonetheless. The treatment is experimental, extremely experimental and there is absolutely no evidence it will help her at all. Everyone tells her not to do it, her doctors, her mother, Daniel, her brother Bill especially is against it. They plead with her to not make her last few weeks on earth any more traumatic than they need to be. _Let us say goodbye. Think of Emily. _They implore her but Mulder tells her with sincere honesty that he believes it could work and so she agrees to try it. By some miracle it does work, the cancer goes into remission and for the first time in months he can breathe again. He waits until her family have left before sneaking into her room once more. This time they both cry and embrace and she chants _thank you_ over and over like a mantra in his ear. When they pull apart she kisses him like nothing else in the universe has ever existed, for him it has not. She will live. Nothing else matters because _she will live_. It is a joy the likes of which he has never know. 

They do not mention the kiss when Scully comes back to work several weeks later. She tells him she is leaving Daniel, she and Emily are going to rent an apartment in the city close to work and Emily’s preschool. He doesn’t comment on it, he doesn’t think she expects him to. Her marriage has never been his business. Still they do not mention the kiss.

Things do begin to change with them though. It’s gradual and slow, so painfully slow but it’s there, the evolving thing between them. Mulder goes to her new apartment with a house warming gift. He meets Emily for the first time; the beautiful little girl that hides behind Scully’s leg and offers him small, shy smiles whilst the grownups talk. Scully says she looks just like Melissa but he disagrees – she is all Scully, right down to the tiny freckles delicately dashed across her nose. How could anyone let them go? That’s what he thinks. This perfect family that he never even knew he wanted till just now, how could anyone have had them and let them go. He will never understand Daniel Waterston.

Friday nights at the shooting range become Friday movie nights. It’s not as if he or Scully needed the shooting practice much and though any time spent with Scully is a good time, he quickly learns that an evening spent all three of them snuggled together under a blanket, eating unsalted popcorn (he has argued his feelings on this abomination many times and never once won) and watching Disney films is much preferable to, well, pretty much anything else. Emily seems to like him, really seems to like him and it makes him misty eyed every time he thinks about it. She thinks he’s silly and funny and strong and the only one that can protect her and Mommy or so Scully tells him one night on her couch after Emily has gone to bed. Scully is terrified she is somehow failing to raise her daughter to know that women can be just as strong and able to protect themselves as men can. Mulder wants to sympathise, really he does but it also makes him so unbelievably proud he feel he may burst from it. 

Diana comes back from Europe, back to the bureau, back to him six years after she had left. It feels like a lifetime ago. Things get messy for a while. Diana has always had a way of crawling under his skin, seeking out his happiness and destroying it. It seems things have not changed. Scully doesn’t trust her, he’s not quite sure why or why it pisses him off so much. If Scully’s marriage has never been any of his business then his should be none of hers. He tells her this, in as many words, accuses her of being jealous, of only missing his free babysitting services. She looks like he has just slapped her. He regrets it instantly but he cannot take it back. They don’t talk for a couple of weeks and its agony. It’s like when she was ill except this time it’s all his fault. It’s enough to bring him to his senses; he finally shows Diana the door, for good this time and she takes it, she leaves his life with a biter spoken promise to never return. All he feels is relief. 

The New Year, the new Millennium. Mulder rings it in in hospital after another run in with a suspect. Scully and Emily come and visit him and Emily sneaks him contraband cookies and a homemade card. He thinks she has probably just overtaken Scully as his favourite person ever. By the time midnight rolls around he is being discharged, Emily is asleep in the waiting room chair and he is kissing Scully a happy new year. This kiss is nothing like the last one they shared that was so desperate, so full of fear and relief, of sadness and joy. This one is full of nothing but hope. It’s so chaste it almost platonic but he will not not talk about it this time.


	3. Three

They are just on the cusp of something, something that he has no doubt will be utterly wonderful, something he is now sure all three of them (Emily included) wants to happen and then his mother dies and everything falls to hell. The investigation into his mother’s death leads Mulder to the man that may have taken his sister. After twenty-seven years he is about to get the answers he has always been seeking. The bones, _god_ so many bones of so many children buried in the backyard of this monster’s trailer. It will take days to know if his sister is amongst them. He begs Scully to fly out and the lead the excavation. For some reason he needs her to be the one to find Samantha, to identify her, to give him his answers. He can feel that his entire being is about to implode and he needs her to be there, to try and hold together some of the pieces. If anyone can put him back together it’s her. And even though she doesn’t do any out of state work since Emily, she takes Emily to her mother and goes to him. And she does it. She finds his sister. Her bones are amongst the ruins of so many in that damned backyard. She comes to his motel room after an exhausting day in the lab and she does not need to say a word when he opens the door to her. He knows. She knows he knows and he collapses into her. At some point during the hours of sobbing and talking and drinking that follows he starts to kiss her and it quickly escalates to a frenzied passion bordering on insanity. She kisses him back at first, eager to offer him any comfort she can but she quickly stops when he has her pinned to the dubious bedspread of his motel bed, arms pinned up by her head, legs trapped under his torso. It’s only a second but sees the fear flick across her face. He only just makes it to the bathroom before he throws up. And just when he’s starting to really hate himself she kneels behind him, rubs his back, kisses his head and whispers to him that it’s not a no just not right now, not like this, that she loves him too much for it to happen like this. He sobs some more. She holds him like she’s never going to let go.

When they return to D.C. she refuses to let him wallow in self-pity over what he did to her and what he almost did. She cuts him off every time he tries to apologise, kisses him on the mouth to let him know she isn’t angry. He still feels overwhelmingly guilty. And then Daniel has a heart-attack and everything becomes even more uncertain between them. He looks after Emily whilst she visits her ex-husband, whilst he begs her to give them another chance to be a family and she seriously considers it. At least Mulder thinks she is seriously considering it when she tells him about it later on his couch, Emily asleep in his bedroom down the hall. But really he is truly stupid. She didn’t consider it at all, there was nothing to consider she tells him along with a lot of other stuff about choices and paths and everything leading to this moment in time. It’s hard to remember exactly what she says because immediately afterwards she swings her leg over his, straddles his hips and kisses him like her life depends on it. And then she strips down to nothing at all and gives him the most heart-stopping, soul-altering, universe-ending sex of his entire life right there on his couch. And afterwards when she has cleaned up, checked on Emily and stolen one of his t-shirts to wear she gathers the blanket from the back of his couch to cover both of them and snuggles up in his lap like a very sleepy, sated kitten. He knows he is never going to be the same.

The next few weeks pass in a blur of ecstasy. They act like horny teenagers, stealing kisses and forbidden touches wherever they can. Mulder practically lives at hers; returning there each night, eating dinner with her and Emily, helping to put Em to bed and then making out on her couch like there’s no tomorrow. Emily seems more than a little pleased he is around so often and doesn’t even question when she wanders into Mommy’s bedroom one morning to find him there (and thank god Scully always insists they put some clothes on as soon as they are done just in case of such an incident). Em has always been ahead of them on this one. When she asks a couple of mornings later when they are getting married Scully almost chokes on her pancakes. Mulder just smiles. As far as he is concerned the answer is as soon as he is able to convince her to.

The baby thing comes up quite early on. The morning after that first unbelievable night he realises they hadn’t used a condom. He asks her if she’s on birth control or if he needs to go and get something for her and the look on her face confuses him. There were complications with Emily’s birth, she explains, they don’t need protection – it’s impossible for her to conceive naturally again. She’s never told him that but then why would she? It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you casually discuss with a co-worker, even one that was so painfully obviously in love with you, and had been for years. Scully says she has Emily and that is enough. Though the look on her face still breaks his heart. He holds her close and tells her he loves her, exactly as she had done to him after she’d found his sister. But she doesn’t cry or retch over a toilet bowl in response she simply shrugs her shoulders, offers him a small smile and tells him that’s life.

A few weeks later Mulder is petrified she is sick again. She’s been clear for three years but she is starting to get ill once more, he knows it. She’s tired all the time, passing out without cause, feeling nauseous, just like before she tells him in a frightened little voice one night when he demands to know what is going on. _What the hell are we going to tell Emily_ she asks? _It’ll be so much worse for her this time round, she’ll understand so much more._ He doesn’t know what to say. What can he say to that? He goes with her to the doctor’s appointment and sits in silence in the waiting room. When she is called he grabs her hand and sits stoically beside her waiting to hear the news that might end both of their lives. Only it never comes. Pregnant. Impossibly impossible and yet somehow true. She is pregnant with his baby. Scully refuses to believe it at first, demands to see the blood work for herself. His scientist always needing empirical proof. And there it is in black and white, so clear not even Scully can deny it. She’s pregnant. He stumbles out into the carpark, following her in a thick fog of emotion. He knows she is shocked but he’s starting to worry about her reaction. Did she want this baby? His baby? But then she turns to him suddenly and throws her arms around his neck. _A baby_. She whispers, her voice full of wonder and he knows everything will be alright.

When he proposes she tells him he is old-fashioned, that he doesn’t have to marry her just because he has knocked her up. He laughs as if he hasn’t wanted to marry her since the first moment he saw her when they both wore rings to signal they belonged to another. Seven years. He’s wanted to marry her every day since. Em rolls her eyes at the ridiculousness of her parents, she looks sixteen not six and so like Scully he wants to cry. She tells Scully to put him out of his misery already. Their child is scarily perceptive. Scully sighs dramatically as if she is being ganged up on and tells him she supposes she can marry him if it really means that much to everyone and then she looks at him with that goofy smile of hers and he’s suddenly lightheaded. For the first time since before Samantha was taken he has a feeling in his chest blooming so tight it can’t possibly be contained. After years of searching he has finally found where he belongs. He is happy. He is loved. 


End file.
